India made 2nd highest number of content restriction requests from Facebook in H2 2015

The social networking giant reported 14,971 content restrictions from India, down from the 15,155 requests in the first half of 2015Neha Alawadhi | ET Bureau | Updated: April 29, 2016, 08:03 IST

India made the second highest number of content restriction requests on Facebook in the second half of 2015, after France, which saw an unusually high number of content restrictions after the terrorist attacks in November.

While Facebook restricted a total of 37,695 requests in France, 32,100 of these were "instances of a single image related to the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris" that was alleged to violate French laws related to the protection of human dignity, the company said in a statement.

The social networking giant reported 14,971 content restrictions from India, down from the 15,155 requests in the first half of 2015. Barring the 32,100 instances of the same image being restricted in France, India made the highest number of content restriction requests in the second half of the year. This makes India the top requester for content removal for the third consecutive year.

"We restricted access in India to categories of content in response to legal requests from government agencies, including law enforcement agencies," Facebook said on its website.

"We also restricted access to content in categories these agencies have identified as illegal that have been brought to our attention by non-government entities, such as NGOs and members of the Facebook community. The majority of the content was restricted as alleged anti-religious and hate speech that could cause unrest and disharmony within India," it added.

Content restriction requests are made by governments when they believe that something on the Internet violates their laws, and approach companies such as Facebook and Twitter to restrict access to that content.

India also made the second highest requests for user data at 5,561, after the United States which made 19,235 requests for user data in the July-December 2015 period.

"The vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings. In many of these cases, the government is requesting basic subscriber information, such as name and length of service. Requests may also ask for IP address logs or account content," Facebook says in an explanatory note about user data requests. Facebook produced some data for 50.87% of the Indian user data requests.

Facebook, which counts India as its second largest market after the United States, and the company emphasised that it does not provide governments with backdoors to its user data.

"As we have emphasized many times, Facebook does not provide any government with “back doors” or direct access to people’s data. We scrutinize each request for user data we receive for legal sufficiency, no matter which country is making the request. If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back hard and will fight in court, if necessary," said Chris Sonderby, Deputy General Counsel, Facebook in a blog detailing the latest report.